Limp Bizkit

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water

Flip/Interscope

The most recent offering from multi-platinum rap-metal kingpins Limp Bizkit arrives a little more than a year after the extraordinarily successful Significant Other, and its blend of anger, aggression, shriek rock, and hip-hop is right in line with the turf they tore up on the earlier set.

Frontman Fred Durst makes a few fleeting efforts to come across as the more sensitive maniac this time around, even turning in a harmony-filled ballad (“Hold On”), which he cowrote with guest vocalist Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots.

But more often than not, he's flipping the bird to anyone and everyone within range.

At times, the stuff is so purely moronic that it stretches the definitions of absurdity. The easiest reference here is “Hot Dog,” which for supposed shock value repeats various utterances of the F word more than 45 times in the course of a 3-minute-and-50-second song. By that point, the shock value's shot, leaving Durst dusting off as little more than a cartoon caricature.

So it's not great art. Is that a surprise? The disc does, however, pack a sonic rattle that blows away a lot of others mining this genre. When Limp Bizkit tears through the guitar and bass crush of “My Generation”— not the Who song, though Durst does throw in a few "g-g-g-generation" nods—the effect is dizzying. And the album's most potent song, “Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle),” is massively loud, unfailingly direct, and so well defined that it's reprised later in more urban form as “Rollin' (Urban Assault Vehicle).” Rappers DMX, Redman, and Method Man add their lines to the latter take.